Killing the Goose

by Frances

  Miss Gipson was not thinking of George. She had collected her mail at the desk when she came in, and the top letter was addressed to Miss Amelia Gibson. Miss Gipson’s eyes had hardened when she saw this, and realized that the world was at its nonsense again. There was no reason why the world, including department stores with fur collections to announce, should not learn that Miss Gipson’s name was spelled with a p, instead of a common b. Miss Gipson had had a good deal of trouble with the world about this and resignedly expected to have more. It was not that she did not make the difference clear.

  “Gip-son,” she had always said, with the clearest possible enunciation. “With a P, not a B. Gip-son.”

  But the world was slovenly. To the world, Gipson sounded very like Gibson, and Gibson was easier. So Miss Gipson was, except by those who knew her best, almost always incorrectly addressed, and this did nothing to lessen her conviction that things were, in general, very badly run. They had been badly run as long as she could remember, and her memory started, with clarity, at the age of five. Of late years, things had been worse run than before, if anything.

  “Good evening,” Miss Gipson said to George, automatically and without sniffing. She said nothing more and George said nothing more until the car stopped at the tenth floor of the Holborn Annex. Miss Gipson stepped firmly out and went firmly down the corridor—down the middle of the corridor—to her door. She opened it and went in to her one-room furnished apartment, with bath, and laid her letters on the coffee table—from which Miss Gipson never drank coffee—which was in front of the sofa, on which Miss Gipson never lounged. She took off her hat and put it on the closet shelf and went to the bathroom and washed her face in lukewarm water. She dried her face and did not examine it further, knowing what it looked like. She washed her hands. She went back and sat down, erectly, on the sofa and opened her letters, beginning with the first one. She looked at it, sniffed—Miss Gipson did not wear furs, and disapproved of those who did—put it back in its envelope and laid it on the coffee table. She laid it so that it squared with the oblong of the table. She picked up the next letter.

  It was correctly addressed. It began: “Dear Aunt Amelia.” The writing of the letter was almost like printing; to it there was a certain flagrance, a kind of impertinence. But the content of the letter was straight-forward, almost blunt. Miss Gipson read it and sat for a moment looking at it.

  “Well!” Miss Gipson said to herself. “She will, will she? Nonsense!”

  Miss Gipson read the letter again, and smiled a little. She looked at the postmark and smiled again. By this time Nora would have got her letter; by this time Nora would know better, as she should have known from the beginning. That nonsense was going to end; that nonsense had, in fact, ended. No niece of hers.… Miss Gipson let the thought go unfinished. She took up the next letter. It, also, was correctly addressed. It began: “Dear Amelia.” Miss Gipson read it and her eyes narrowed. She read it again and put it down on her lap and looked at the opposite wall without seeing it clearly. It was as if she were looking through the opposite wall out into a world full of nonsense—reprehensible nonsense. Miss Gipson’s face was not expressive, and there was no one there to attempt its reading. But it was for a moment troubled; for a moment confidence was uneasy on it. There was more than one kind of nonsense in the world, Miss Gipson thought.

  “But,” she reminded herself, “there are more ways than one of killing a cat, too.”

  She put the letter down on top of the one which began “Dear Aunt Amelia” and opened her fourth letter. She merely glanced at it and put it down on the letter advertising furs. She made it expressly clear that she had no intention of paying good money for unsatisfactory merchandise, war or no war. If storekeepers chose to disregard her irrefutable statements, the responsibility—and the inevitable chagrin—were theirs. Miss Gipson’s position had been stated.

  She sat for a moment and then picked up the letter which began “Dear Amelia” and read it again. She also read again the letter from Nora. Then she put these two letters in a pigeonhole of a small secretary. She put the other two letters in a wastebasket, after tearing them twice across. She thought a moment, took out the letter which had contained a bill she had no intention of paying, and tore it into even small fragments. It was entirely possible that the maid who cleaned the room read letters thrown into the wastebasket, piecing them together like crossword puzzles. There was, certainly, little to indicate that she did much else in the room. Miss Gipson absently ran a finger along the writing shelf of the secretary and looked at it. She made a small, disparaging sound with her tongue and teeth. Nonsense! War or no war, an apartment hotel like the Annex could manage to get proper help. The management was shiftless and indifferent. It permitted chambermaids not only to neglect their jobs, but to wear perfume while doing it. Miss Gipson sniffed. More than usual, this time, and a new brand. No improvement, however; there were no gradations in perfume, so far as Miss Gipson could tell. All represented laxity, at the best. At the worst they were invitations to the most nonsensical of human activities. It was an activity in which Miss Gipson had never had a part, and which—she hardly needed to assure herself—she had no interest. Wherein, it had to be admitted, she differed from far too much of the world. Miss Gipson had no illusion that the particular nonsense to which perfume—and so much else you could see and hear and in other fashions not ignore—invited, was of limited scope. Miss Gipson saw it, in its secondary manifestations, to be sure, everywhere. She had disapproved of it since she was ten; her disapproval had never faltered.

  “Chambermaids!” Miss Gipson thought. “Boys, nothing but boys. And Nora.”

  Miss Gipson would not have spoken thus scatteredly. Her conversation was never scattered. But her thoughts, as she so often had occasion to point out, were her own.

  She looked at the watch. It told her the time was ten minutes of six. Then the telephone rang.

  “Miss Gipson speaking,” she said, as soon as she picked up the telephone. She waited a moment for the inevitable readjustment to take place. “This is Miss Gipson,” she said. She said it in the tone of forbearance she had used so often when she had a desk of her own at the college, before it became necessary for her to resign because nonsense—and worse than nonsense—was so widespread even at Ward; before it was clear that, even there, the moral laxity which was demoralizing the world was creeping in. Not that the world’s morality, even at its best, had ever met Miss Gipson’s standards.

  “Yes, John?” Miss Gipson said into the telephone. Her tone was not inviting. She listened.

  “There is no reason for any further discussion,” she said. “And in any case, I am occupied this evening.”

  She listened again.

  “There is no use going over that again, John,” she said. “I am perfectly aware that it says at my discretion. I am exercising my discretion. Mr. Backley entirely agrees.”

  She listened again, briefly.

  “I can only advise patience, John,” she said. “It is an excellent virtue. I am sure my dear brother meant you to learn patience when he made his very wise arrangements about you and your sister.”

  She listened again.

  “About that, also, I must exercise my discretion,” she said. “You can tell your sister so. I have already told her. She cannot expect me to be a party to what I consider immorality.”

  The answer was apparently only a word or two—perhaps only a word.

  “Immorality,” Amelia Gipson repeated, without emotion. “I call it what it is. Nora cannot expect me to countenance any such action. I shall certainly make the situation clear to the person concerned if she makes it necessary. I’ve told her that.”

  She listened again, for the last time.

  “I do not care if I am the only person in the world who takes what you call that attitude,” she said. “So much the worse for the world. Right is right, John. Good-bye.”

  She hung up. She nodded her head slightly, approving herself. She looked at her watch.
It was six o’clock. She shook her head in slight annoyance over that. She got her hat from the closet and put it on without consulting a mirror. She checked the contents of her orderly handbag. She looked around the orderly room and left it, locking the door behind her. She had insisted on a special lock, which she could make sure of with her own key.

  George was no longer on the elevator. There was a girl operating it and there was a faint scent of perfume in the car; it was not, Miss Gipson thought, the same scent she had noticed in her apartment. Otherwise she would have thought that this was the chambermaid on her floor. The girl said, “Good evening,” and Miss Gipson slightly inclined her head without replying. She would not encourage the nonsense of girls as elevator operators.

  The doorman also said, “Good evening,” to Miss Gipson. She replied to him, in a clear, decisive voice which did not invite further conversation. She walked up the street to the Square, and the doorman looked after her and, as she turned the corner, raised his shoulders just perceptibly and for his own amusement. Quite an old girl, the doorman thought. Glad he wasn’t married to her. Then he realized that was an odd thought to have in relation to Miss Gipson, although it had no doubt been widely held.

  It was ten after six when Miss Gipson sat down to dinner in a tearoom near Washington Square. It was called the Green House and the door was painted green and there were ferns in the window. The waitress put the usual peg under one of the legs of Miss Gipson’s table to steady it and said they had a few lamb chops and it was lucky Miss Gipson had not been a few minutes later. Miss Gipson had a lamb chop, very well done, and creamed potatoes, string beans, and a salad of two slices of tomato and a lettuce leaf with a rather sour dressing. She had a piece of cocoanut cake and a cup of tea, and caught an uptown Fifth Avenue bus at a few minutes before seven.

  It was twenty minutes past seven when Miss Gipson entered the New York Public Library for the last time. Since she had been working regularly at the library for several weeks and had worked close to schedule during afternoons and evenings, it was subsequently possible to trace her movements with fair exactitude. She had entered one of the elevators at around seven-thirty or a little before, and had got off at the third floor. She had turned in slips for Famous American Murders, by Algernon Bentley; The Trial of Martha West, one of the Famous Trials series; and for magazine articles on the unsolved murder of Lorraine Purdy—unsolved largely because of the disappearance of Frank Purdy, whom Lorraine had unwisely married—and the presumably solved domestic crime wave which had taken off the elderly Mrs. William Rogers and her daughter, Susan, together with a maid who had unwisely eaten what remained of some chicken à la king which had been prepared primarily for Mrs. Rogers but had been, in the end, rather too widely distributed. Mrs. Rogers’ nephew had been suspected of adding an unorthodox ingredient to the chicken à la king, but there had been other possibilities. The nephew, whose name was Samuel King, had been somewhat halfheartedly convicted by a jury, which resolved its doubts by bringing in a second-degree verdict, to the freely expressed annoyance of Justice Ryerson.

  Amelia Gipson had received the books and the bound volumes of the magazines in which the articles appeared in the North Reading Room. At about nine o’clock, or a few minutes later, she had been seen by one of the attendants leaving the catalogue-room through the main door. A few minutes later she had returned. She had been absent about long enough to walk to a drinking fountain down the corridor, the attendant thought.

  At a quarter of ten, fifteen minutes before the library closed, Miss Gipson became violently ill at her seat at one of the long tables. She died in the emergency ward of Bellevue Hospital at about eleven o’clock. Sodium fluoride poisoning had been diagnosed promptly; but Miss Gipson had not responded to treatment.

  2

  TUESDAY, 10:55 P.M. TO WEDNESDAY, 12:10 A.M.

  Mr. North was reading a manuscript, and the word No was slowly forming itself in his mind when the whirring started. At first it was not clearly identifiable as a whirring. It was more a kind of buzzing. It might, Jerry North thought, even be in his head. Exhaustion, possibly. Or the manuscript. He shook his head, thinking the sound might go away, and dug back into the manuscript. “It must be admitted,” the manuscript said, “that in the post-war world we face an increasing agglomeration of—” Clearly, Jerry North decided, it was the manuscript. The post-war world was buzzing at him. Its shining machinery, made to a large degree out of plastic, was whirring at unimagined tasks, turning out things made largely of glass. Whatever the post-war world might finally be, it would inevitably also be a buzzing in the ears.

  He put down the manuscript and covered his eyes with a hand and waited for this audible omen of the future to go away. It did not go away. It came into the living-room and sat down on the sofa. If it was in his head, there was something drastically wrong with his head. A little fearfully, Mr. North parted his fingers and looked at the sofa, on which the future sat, buzzing. The future was Mrs. North, wearing an apron over a very short play suit. The future, Jerry North decided, was brighter than he had allowed himself to hope. The future was Pamela North in a checked apron over a brief play suit, with a bowl in its lap and an eggbeater in its hands.

  Jerry smiled at his wife, who stared into the bowl with fixed interest. A cake, Jerry decided, vaguely. It was an odd time to be making a cake. Ten o’clock—no, five after ten—in the evening was an odd time to make a cake. But when Pam made cakes—and when she made pies, as she sometimes did, and once doughnuts—it was apt to be at odd times. She had made doughnuts at an odd time, the only time she had made doughnuts. They had been to the theater and, waiting for a cab, had stepped for shelter under the awning of a store in which they were making doughnuts and serving them to people, apparently to advertise a brand of coffee. Pam had said nothing then, but when she had got home she had said suddenly that what she was hungry for was doughnuts, and why not make some? They had made some and they were fine, but Pam had somehow mis-estimated, because there were more doughnuts than, from the ingredients involved, seemed conceivable. They had made doughnuts until after two in the morning, taking turns frying them, and by that time everything in the house was full of doughnuts and so were the Norths. They were full of doughnuts for several days and after that they were not much interested in doughnuts for a long time, and never again in making them. That, of course, was pre-war; post-war would unquestionably be different. There would, Mr. North thought, eyeing the manuscript, be little room for doughnuts in the post-war world.

  “Hmmm!” Pam said. Jerry looked at her and she was looking into the bowl and had stopped turning the eggbeater. He deduced that the sound, which had not really so much form even as “hmmm,” invited him to conversation.

  “Cake?” he said, by way of conversation.

  “As far as I can see,” Pam North said, “it’s whipped cream and always will be. Of course not, Jerry! At ten o’clock at night?”

  “Not a cake,” Jerry said. He thought. “Pie?” he said, a little hopefully.

  “You don’t beat a pie,” Pam said. “And it would still be ten o’clock at night, wouldn’t it?”

  “I see what you mean,” Jerry said.

  “Butter,” Pam said. “Only it isn’t. And it’s been half an hour. Or almost.”

  “Butter?” Jerry said.

  Pam said of course butter. What did he think?

  “Well,” Jerry said. “I didn’t think butter. I thought we didn’t have any butter. I thought you had spent your red points up through December.”

  “November,” Mrs. North said. “It’s very nice of Morris, but sometimes I think it’s illegal. Do you suppose it is?”

  Jerry said he supposed it was, in a fairly mild way. But it all came out pretty much the same in the end.

  “Except,” Pam said, “when they end it we’ll be ahead, you know. And where will Morris be?”

  Morris, Mr. North thought, would be all right.

  “Anyway,” Pam said, “there wasn’t any other way I could
think of, and he said it was all right to take them in advance. Of course, it would be different if we had children. It’s different for people with children. Particularly babies.” Mrs. North resumed grinding the eggbeater. “Babies really pay off,” she said. “Nothing but milk, or blue points at the worst. Before they abolished them.”

  “Listen,” Jerry said, pulling himself away from the idea that someone had abolished babies. “What about butter? I thought you couldn’t use any more butter. I thought it was straight olive oil from here on in.”

  “Of course we can’t use butter,” Pam said. “That’s why I’m making it.”

  “You’re—” Jerry said and paused—“you’re making butter?”

  “Why not?” Pam said. “Only apparently I’m not. It’s still whipped cream. And they told me it wouldn’t be more than half an hour.”

  “You mean,” Jerry said, “that you’re sitting there, in a play suit, making butter? Butter?”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Churning, really. You take some cream—except the cream’s so thin now you have to take the top of milk, except the milk’s pretty thin too—and beat it until it’s butter. If ever, which I doubt. Here, you churn.”

  She lifted the bowl from her lap and held it toward Jerry, who got up and went over to the sofa and sat down beside her and looked into the bowl. It was full of whipped cream, sure enough. He said so. He said it just looked like whipped cream to him.

  “Although come to think of it,” he said, “my mother used to say to look out it didn’t turn to butter. That was when I was a boy, of course.”

  “Well,” Pam said. “There still is butter, even if you aren’t a boy. And everybody says it will work. Beat, Jerry!”

  Jerry beat. He held the eggbeater in his left hand and twirled with his right, and the beater made a deep, intricate swirl in the soft, yellowish whipped cream.